But only last week I’d heard my mother and Brooks talking about that very thing. My mother said, “If you don’t educate someone, they don’t have skills. If they don’t have skills, they can’t get a job. If they can’t get a job, they’re poor and on welfare. You can’t keep someone from being educated, and then condemn them for taking welfare.” Brooks said, “I know, but this is too much, Paige. They’re going too far now.” I’d walked into the room and said, “What’s too much?” and they’d changed the subject. They must have been talking about the same thing LaRue was, this “Freedom Summer.” How far were the Negroes supposed to go? Close as my mother and I were to Peacie, there was a separateness enforced by her as much as us.
But now I thought of her standing below me in the kitchen, keeping my mother alive. I thought of LaRue, and I realized I loved him and that my mother loved Peacie, they loved each other. I got off my bed and went over to the window. The clouds were ill-formed today, indistinct. I liked the cumulous clouds better; they looked like clouds were supposed to look.
It made me nervous to think about things changing so much, about college students from up north coming down here to tell us what to do. Everybody watching. The coloreds liked their separateness, didn’t they? Everybody was more comfortable with their own! The people in Shakerag didn’t want to live with us any more than we wanted to live with them. Those kids from up north had started big trouble and LaRue’s nephew had to pay for it.
I moved back to my bed, lay down, and closed my eyes. It was too hard to try to think of what was right and wrong in the world. I wanted to think only about my mother, who was undergoing big changes of her own. She had a date tonight.
It was a date with Brooks, about which she was excited, and she had carefully planned what to wear. Not her normal britches, with the zipper in the crotch that Peacie had put in so that we could put the urinal right up to her—no need to pull down pants and fool around with all that lifting and pulling. Unzip, pee, wipe, zip up, done. Easy. “This is ingenious,” my mother had told Peacie when she thought of it. “You should patent this!”
“I ’spect I should,” Peacie had said. “I ’spect I should patent my brain; I got a lot of ideas.” It came to me now as a warm flush over my chest that when she said that, I was thinking they were Negro ideas. But they were just ideas, free-floating and of no color at all.
But tonight: no slacks for my mother—all of hers had been unfashionable even new, but now every pair was stretched out at the waist and unevenly faded. Tonight she was going to be careful not to drink much of anything, so she wouldn’t have to pee. And she was going to wear a dress, a yellow sleeveless dress she had hanging in her closet that came with a matching yellow sweater that had daisies embroidered on it, rhinestones for the centers. She would wear nylon stockings and little yellow heels. I swallowed hard against a lump that formed in my throat. Because I had seen her in yellow, and I knew she would look so pretty and for what.
Peacie stayed late to help get my mother ready. Mrs. Gruder stood by, ready to assist, and I sat at my mother’s feet, watching. Peacie applied mascara to my mother’s lashes with painstaking care; they were longer than ever. She used lipstick for blush. She made sure my mother’s nails were perfectly painted in the rose color they both liked best. When she finished, my mother asked Mrs. Gruder, “How do I look?”
“Like the Breck girl,” Mrs. Gruder said, standing before her in plain admiration, her hands clasped.
“Well,” my mother said, smiling, “maybe a little.”
Peacie also supervised my mother being loaded into Brooks’s car. She was like one of her own chickens, running around and pecking at the men, telling them what to do and what not to.
First, my mother was transferred from her wheelchair into the car seat—that was awkward. I stood by, watching helplessly until her dress rose up too high; then I had a job of pulling it down. Next, her wheelchair was put into the trunk,